Remembering the talented activist who lived in our Internet neighborhood.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about Aaron Swartz. It probably was from reading Dave Winer’s blog more than 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The guy effused glowingly about Swartz as a young teenager.

“Aaron is the brightest 13 year old I've ever met on the Internet,” Winer wrote in February 2001. “It's not just bit smarts, he marshals power very well and is persistent. Eventually you come around to his way of thinking, or he comes around to yours. These are the essential ingredients in good technology. We're looking for the right answer, not to be proven right, or to prove the other guy wrong.”

There’s a slew of early mentions on Winer’s blog about Swartz. By the fall of 2002, Swartz may have been the youngest speaker at Comdex, ever. I remember reading about this guy, who was hobnobbing with some of my tech heroes and was actively getting involved in the RSS 1.0 specification. I identified with Swartz—I saw him as a magnified, younger, nerdier, more-articulate, more-talented version of myself.

“In terms of my personal history, I learned how to program myself through reading programs others had written, and asking questions about them on the Web,” Swartz wrote in early 2001.

“Responses to my naive questions were generally courteous and almost always helpful. I got back responses extremely quickly—rarely longer than a day. And through this method I eventually learned to program. I took no pre-set course, and had no usual instruction. However, while I was able to learn to program through this method, there is no similar system to learn to program well, which is usually something altogether different.”

Sure, I fancied myself a geek, but I never learned to program (beyond rudimentary HTML)—and I occasionally tinkered in games on my TI-85—but really, I was a poseur, an observer. I spent many nights in high school staying up late, trolling IRC warez channels, and listening to Art Bell on the radio. But rather than (like me) being on the periphery of the geek crowd (and beginning my career as a tech journalist), Swartz was deep in the center of it.

By summer 2004, when I went to journalism school in New York, I penned my first-ever article for Wired magazine. It was a short “front-of-the-book” profile of Aaron Swartz. Sometime later, when I was living in Oakland, I gave him a ride from the Rockridge BART station to a conference he was attending at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley.

"Four years ago I probably would have said I'd be some kind of startup guy," Swartz told me in the summer of 2004, as he was about to enter his freshman year of college, "but the law seems really interesting to me. It's a system of rules, like computers are and you can hack it by finding the implications of those rules. Go to a judge, show your hack, and the judge has the power to change the world based on your conclusions."

And that sort of set the tone for what he would do later in life, as I followed him from a distance. Swartz dropped out of Stanford. Founded two startups. Made boatloads of money when one of those (reddit) sold to Condé Nast (Ars’ parent company). Founded an organization, Demand Progress. Spent his next few years trying to better the intersections of technology, politics, and law and stood up for his beliefs.

By 2009, Swartz had decided to liberate loads of articles off of PACER, and published his own FBI file stemming from that escapade. (My colleague Tim Lee chronicled Swartz’ later years on Ars.)

I last saw Swartz in person in September 2010, on the sidelines of the “Internet at Liberty” conference in Budapest—he, Evgeny Morozov, and I joked on the street for a few minutes between sessions. (Less than a year later, Swartz popped up again, getting himself arrested for accessing JSTOR.)

"Oh, and BTW, I'll miss you all."

I found out on Saturday that Swartz—chillingly—had the foresight back in 2002 to give away his most valuable possessions in the event of his death.

“I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available from aaronsw.com,” he wrote.

Source Code: Copyright for my GPLed source code should revert to the Free Software Foundation. They seem to have a reasonable policy about letting people use the code.

Websites: Please keep the websites operational where possible, with content written by me kept untouched where appropriate. Appropriate pages (e.g. on aaronsw.com) may contain a notice about what happened with a link to more info. The front page of aaronsw.com should be redone as appropriate with a link to the old page.

Grave
I'd like to rest someplace that won't kill me. That means access to oxygen (although direct access would probably be bad) and not having to climb through six feet of dirt.

and, appropriately, he concluded: “Oh, and BTW, I'll miss you all.”

We miss you too, Aaron—your number is still in my phone. May you find the peace you always sought.

Promoted Comments

Hello everyone, I'm Aaron. I'm not _that_ much of a coder, (and Idon't know much Perl) but I do think what you're doing is pretty cool,so I thought I'd hang out here and follow along (and probably pester abit).

He attended a symposium in Stanford in 2001 with geeks from the web world, especially W3C. He was on the RDF W3C working group (via a cunning hack called the HTML writers guild IIRC). All at the grand old age of 14. The following year he visited the UK (for a working group meeting? I forget) where I met him. He was a sweet, smart, nerdy kid. What made him different was probably his confidence in his own views, and his ability to communicate with adult engineers on their level. The internet made that possible to a large degree, since his precocious nature wasn't apparent.

The Winer quote makes me chuckle, since he listed Aaron as one of his enemies within a year. Very Winer-ish :-) Aaron seems to have maintained that knack for gaining adversaries into his 20s. (His recent trouble brings to mind "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?")

Hello everyone, I'm Aaron. I'm not _that_ much of a coder, (and Idon't know much Perl) but I do think what you're doing is pretty cool,so I thought I'd hang out here and follow along (and probably pester abit).

He attended a symposium in Stanford in 2001 with geeks from the web world, especially W3C. He was on the RDF W3C working group (via a cunning hack called the HTML writers guild IIRC). All at the grand old age of 14. The following year he visited the UK (for a working group meeting? I forget) where I met him. He was a sweet, smart, nerdy kid. What made him different was probably his confidence in his own views, and his ability to communicate with adult engineers on their level. The internet made that possible to a large degree, since his precocious nature wasn't apparent.

The Winer quote makes me chuckle, since he listed Aaron as one of his enemies within a year. Very Winer-ish :-) Aaron seems to have maintained that knack for gaining adversaries into his 20s. (His recent trouble brings to mind "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?")

I believe that individuals have a sovereign right over their existence. I believe that whatever so-called mental illness or irrationality does not inalienate this right - as long as no one else's life or well being is threatened. In my book, it is the essence of a basic human right to be able to dispose of oneself as you see fit.

All this crap about "asking for help" comforts only the well-adjusted, untormented bystander. What is rational from one point of view might not be so from another, but who are we to judge ? I'm not saying that help lines have no reason to be, I only think that we are sometimes quick to interfere in other people's affairs. Not everything can be cured and we are all going there sooner or later anyway. Respect for self-determination should be a dignified civility and fuck the bishop's opinions.

Left me to see neglected Genius bloom,Neglected die! and tell it on his tomb;[...]Oh let me live my own! and die so too!("To live and die is all I have to do:")Maintain a Poet's Dignity and Ease,And see what friends, and read what books I please.

...I believe that whatever so-called mental illness or irrationality does not inalienate this right - as long as no one else's life or well being is threatened...

[emphasis mine]

I should have stopped reading right here since you apparently doubt mental illness as a legitimate thing.

careful with the hasty judgments. consider that masturbation was once regarded as a mental defect, women standing up to men as hysteric, and homosexuality was seen as a mental illness not too long ago, there is legitimate argument as to what constitutes mental illness (cf thomas szasz, "the myth of mental illness"). now, suffering myself from chronic depression, i am not disputing that it seems to be an illness in some cases, and a debilitating one at that, but whether it's "mental" is up for discussion IMO, and whether suicide is necessarily irrational is a whole different question. there is research showing that depressed people are often more realistic than non-depressed people; interesting, no?

i am not going to speculate on aaron's motivations as i didn't know him well enough. but if i'll kill myself, it won't be irrational. it'll be after my personal cost:benefit analysis comes up seriously short on benefits. because it's exhausting to battle this every day for decades, and i am tired. so very tired. there is nothing irrational per se about wanting to end one's battle against depression, no more so than wanting to end one's battle against cancer. exhortations to "talk to somebody" are well-meaning, but fall short of understanding that talking doesn't cure, and unfortunately often does not even help.

it might help some people in some circumstances, and it's a good thing to mention it to those who are flailing in the dark. but it's also a good idea to consider that one size does not fit all, and i thank Personne up there for expressing respect for our self-determination. we can't choose that we got put into this life, but we damn well ought to be able to choose how and when we'll leave it, without having that choice automatically denigrated as "irrational". each person's cost:benefit analysis differs.

RIP, aaron. i am sorry, for your pain, and that of those who loved you. i am angry at those who hounded you. i am glad you're done with your battle. thank you for giving us your bit of light. i wish i had said this while you were alive; i'll try to do better.

All this crap about "asking for help" comforts only the well-adjusted, untormented bystander. What is rational from one point of view might not be so from another, but who are we to judge ?

Although in some cases you might be right, in many cases people who consider suicide are going through a temporary state of depression and given enough time to sort out their problems they can go back to being happy and not wanting to check out.

The "uninformed bystanders" are often people who went through the same thing, came out the other end, and have the benefit of hindsight. The idea is to not rush into something that's irreversible.

Sad to see him go this route with how much impact and support he had, had access to. It would have been quite the fight to put him in jail. And wish we had seen it happen. I still think we would have seen some change during and after the legal battle.

Then, I am not the one in the position of possibly being jailed for 35 years for accessing academic files.While he probably should have fought for more free access through the organization than making his own access, it seems a weee wayyy over handed of an punishment. Tho usually prosecutors put as many charges they might stick and the max prison time is listed. Majority of the time the person convicted does not nearly get the as much as the max jail time. Its usually adjusted to fit the crime occurred and the person.

Eventually you come around to his way of thinking, or he comes around to yours. These are the essential ingredients in good technology. We're looking for the right answer, not to be proven right, or to prove the other guy wrong.

Fantastic quote about the young man, and something everyone on the internet (hell, everyone, period) should live by.

...I believe that whatever so-called mental illness or irrationality does not inalienate this right - as long as no one else's life or well being is threatened...

[emphasis mine]

I should have stopped reading right here since you apparently doubt mental illness as a legitimate thing.

careful with the hasty judgments. consider that masturbation was once regarded as a mental defect, women standing up to men as hysteric, and homosexuality was seen as a mental illness not too long ago, there is legitimate argument as to what constitutes mental illness (cf thomas szasz, "the myth of mental illness"). now, suffering myself from chronic depression, i am not disputing that it seems to be an illness in some cases, and a debilitating one at that, but whether it's "mental" is up for discussion IMO, and whether suicide is necessarily irrational is a whole different question. there is research showing that depressed people are often more realistic than non-depressed people; interesting, no?

i am not going to speculate on aaron's motivations as i didn't know him well enough. but if i'll kill myself, it won't be irrational. it'll be after my personal cost:benefit analysis comes up seriously short on benefits. because it's exhausting to battle this every day for decades, and i am tired. so very tired. there is nothing irrational per se about wanting to end one's battle against depression, no more so than wanting to end one's battle against cancer. exhortations to "talk to somebody" are well-meaning, but fall short of understanding that talking doesn't cure, and unfortunately often does not even help.

it might help some people in some circumstances, and it's a good thing to mention it to those who are flailing in the dark. but it's also a good idea to consider that one size does not fit all, and i thank Personne up there for expressing respect for our self-determination. we can't choose that we got put into this life, but we damn well ought to be able to choose how and when we'll leave it, without having that choice automatically denigrated as "irrational". each person's cost:benefit analysis differs.

RIP, aaron. i am sorry, for your pain, and that of those who loved you. i am angry at those who hounded you. i am glad you're done with your battle. thank you for giving us your bit of light. i wish i had said this while you were alive; i'll try to do better.

I actually agree that there are certain circumstances in which I'd consider it reasonable to accept suicide as someone's viable option. Whether intervention is possible or moral in other cases, I'm not as sure about, which is why I chose not to pursue those lines of debate.

I take issue with the fact that Personne, via the text I bolded in my quote of him, seems to doubt that mental illness is an actual thing that some people suffer from, and the rest of what he wrote continues with that theme. Sure, I'll give you the fact that we're still learning a lot about what constitutes mental illness and that it may or may not apply to suicide. However, it's unconscionable to try and tell people who are suffering from mental illnesses that their afflictions aren't real. Continuing to claim that they aren't real just because the science is unsettled helps no one.

Of course, if it turns out Personne actually does recognize mental illness as legitimate, then much of what I said doesn't really apply to him. I would say, then, that he needs to be mindful of how he uses qualifying language since it can completely change the tone of an argument.

So extraordinary this Aaron with talent and knowledge in so many areas. A pioneer, an activist for truth about information and freedom. In one of his blogs, he wrote, about depression, to just lean into it. A wise and courageous stance. No one can know what brought him to his point, maybe that's how he ultimately leaned in.

Clinical depression is real as is the gut brain connection and this poor dear suffered with ulcerative colitis

The contribution he has made in this world is tremendous and will reverberate, inspire, and inform.

I hope is he now surrounded by the genuine charm of love and truth and freedom in his being, his spirit, and his soul.

I am so grateful for what I have learned so far from what he wrote, what he read, and how he lived his life